Camilla ToulminDirector,
International Institute of Environment
and Development

UNEP was born in 1972, mandated to protect and improve the
environment for current and future generations. The proclamation
for its establishment notes that “humankind has acquired the
power to transform the environment in countless ways and
unprecedented scale” — and indeed the forty intervening years of
this Anthropocene age have generated major changes in facts,
technology and ways of looking at the world. In that year of the
Stockholm conference on the human environment, the planet
hosted 3.8 billion people, as against 7 billion today; a barrel of oil
sold for $3.50 compared to more than ss$100 now. The year also
witnessed US President Nixon’s visit to China, symbolising the
massive geopolitical shifts that have since taken place.

The early 70s also witnessed the
start of the modern environmental
movement. The Club of Rome’s
landmark Limits to Growth
spurred a set of debates which
spawned Friends of the Earth and
Greenpeace. The International
Institute for Environment and
Development (IIED), which I
have directed since 2004, was
established in 1971 by the
economist Barbara Ward, who wrote
Only One Earth for the Stockholm
Conference. Like many in similar
positions today, my professional
training and career span the period
from the early 70s to today — we
share a common understanding
of the problems and underlying
drivers — and yet have not made
sufficient headway in building a
more sustainable planet. Much more
is needed in the ten years ahead to
marshal the evidence and contest
the interests that block progress.

UNEP has had to tread a difficult
path over the last four decades
– both holding the torch for
environmental matters within
the UN system, while needing to
be nimble in a rapidly changing
landscape. Back in 1972, many
of us believed that government
was well-informed and farsighted,
and could be relied upon to take
decisions for the greater public
good — in contrast to business,
which pursued its own short-term
interests. Science was largely
uncontested and non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) barely existed
as a constituency within the UN
system. Now it is clear that many

governments operate in a timeframe
of days and weeks, while better
corporate practice is thinking ten
or twenty years ahead. Unwelcome
evidence from the scientific
community is cavalierly dismissed,
and NGOs have mushroomed in size
and numbers

The facts have changed a lot over
40 years. Energy use has doubled in
absolute terms but intensity per unit
of GDP has fallen. Global GDP per
head has more than doubled, and the
proportion of people living in poverty
(below $1.50/day) has halved,
from 50 per cent to 25 per cent.
Yet, inequality has also risen with
a significant shift in earnings from
wage labour to investors with capital.

In 1972, China was still largely rural,
and emerging from the Cultural
Revolution. India and Pakistan were
seeing the first impacts of green
revolution technology in agriculture,
with the spread of high yielding dwarf
varieties of wheat and barley, which
helped both countries shift from
regular food shortages and famine
to a regular harvest surplus. At the
time, Norman Borlaug spoke of his
plant breeding work having bought
40 years grace, by when new ways of
achieving crop yield gains would be
needed. The 2007-2008 food and
commodity price spike has shown
how tight are global supplies of basic
grains, and how vulnerable poor
people are to shortages in the global
market, while recent studies show the difficult trade-offs involved in
raising crop production further,
given the need to contain
greenhouse gas emissions and
maintain ecosystem services.

In 1972, the greenhouse effect had
long been identified as a potential
threat, but with no sense of today’s
urgency. The principal environmental
hazards were air pollution (including
acid rain, now much improved),
ozone depletion (now stabilised) and
water quality and availability (still
some way to go, especially in Africa).
We lived free of laptop computers,
mobile phones or fax machines.

The rapid tightening of information
and financial connections since has
generated an extraordinary growth
in trade and financial transactions,
and a thick web of communication
networks, the power of which was
evident in the recent Arab Spring.

telephone line, itself on a shaky
connection to the capital Bamako,
from which the outside world could
be reached on a good day. Today, I
can stand in the shade in Makono
Dembele’s compound, catching the
signal from 30 kilometers away and
chat to my office with sheep braying
in the background. When the power
gets low, a solar panel recharges
the battery.

World politics and perceptions have
also shifted enormously, from the
Cold War years of the 70s through
the western world’s ascendancy in
the 80s and 90s to today’s much
flatter, complex, multi-polar planet.
Although Limits to Growth was
widely decried at its time, there is
a growing recognition that much
of its forecast is turning out to be
pretty accurate. Johan Rockstrom’s
work on planetary boundaries has
re-ignited debate on where such
limits might lie, our uncertainty
as regards the science, and need
to establish “safe space” within
which to operate given the possible
catastrophic impact of crossing
thresholds for global warming and
ocean acidification.

There is also now much more
questioning of our economic
models and underlying assumptions.
Environment has inched from a
bolt-on added extra to becoming
more embedded in the fundamentals
of the economy, thanks to the work
of Nicholas Stern, Pavan Sukhdev,
Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz,
demonstrating the need to price
environmental assets and services
properly to address market failure.

While IIED researchers David
Pearce, Anil Markandya and
Edward Barbier published
Blueprint for a Green Economy in
1988, there was little pick-up by the
mainstream economics community.
Thanks to UNEP and others, green
economic tools are now widely
discussed, as is the role that
government needs to play in
shaping fiscal policy, procurement
policy and pump-priming
green investment funds. Some
governments have begun testing
alternative measures for gross
domestic well-being: such tools
must now be shaped to fit the
needs and priorities of different
nations: a Green Economy for
Mali. Mozambique and Malawi will
differ substantially from those for
Kazakhstan, Qatar and Colombia.

Throughout these tumultuous
decades, UNEP has initiated and
supported much valuable work in
partnership with others, such as
the Convention on International
Trade in Endangered Species
(CITES), the IPCC (with the World
Meteorological Organization), the
UN Global Compact (with UNDP,
UNHCR and others), and the
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
(with the World Resources Institute,
World Bank and UNDP) . It has not
always got things right: in my own
field, it espoused for many years a
simplistic, overblown approach to
desertification, showing massive
sand dunes engulfing fields and villages, obscuring the complexity
of dryland management, and the
positive lessons being learned.
Relations with the Rio Conventions
have had their ups and downs, with
UNEP needing to co-exist with
independent secretariats which
many thought should fit within
its bailiwick.

If Rio, the first Earth Summit
held in 1992, marked UNEP’s
youthful coming of age, Rio+20
brings a moment for more sober
assessment of how difficult it is to
make sustainability happen. After
40 years, we can see more clearly
how a combination of human and
institutional characteristics push in
the opposite direction: while people
are capable of great co-operation
and selflessness at times, they also
exhibit greed and individualism,
short-sighted and status-seeking
behaviour. Animal spirits and
instincts seem as powerful as
reason and evidence. National and
global governance systems are
meant to contain such selfishness
for the common good. Yet, powerful
individuals and nations can block
such a collective enterprise. Pointing
out the alarming discrepancy
between commitments and action
on sustainable development more
than a decade ago, Kofi Annan
described our responses as “too few,
too little, too late”.

As background for Rio+20, UNEP
has published Keeping Track of
Our Changing Environment,
highlighting the good and bad
news since 1992. It is a mixed bag.
There has been a rapid increase in
renewable energy investment, but
solar and wind still account for
only 0.3 per cent of global energy
supply, and 1 in 5 people on the planet still have no access to
electricity. Food production has risen
by 45 per cent yet close on one
billion people remain underfed,
1.5 billion are overweight and a third
of all food is thrown away or wasted.
In future we will have much less
room for manoeuvre. On a planet
where resources are increasingly
scarce, we must set prices that
properly represent the real value of
resources and the costs of different
behaviours. Only governments,
acting together, can do that. UNEP
has a vital role to play, in partnership
with others, in clearly laying out the
consequences of current practice
and exhorting nations and their
citizens to recognise their common
interest in protecting and improving
the environment for current and
future generations.